It’s certainly punk, but it does not rock. At less than a 30-minute running time, it’s revealing that much of Frauhaus! is quite tedious. The future may hold great things for Wetdog, but for now their appeal doesn’t reach much further than diehard genre adherents.

There’s nothing wrong with a band being crass. But when that band tries to act like they’re doing it in order to make a vague, nonsensical statement on twenty-first century love and sex, the result is albums like Reality Check.

More often than not it just comes off as either needlessly melodramatic or watered down to a state of vanilla

A pleasant and inoffensive endeavor, it'll do well to keep any Foxes fan satisfied for the remainder of the season. But don't be surprised if boredom sets in by fall.

But for at least 10 tracks, Gucci is able to sustain a hell of a run, forming perhaps commercial rap's best dispatch this year. There have been, and probably will be, better rap albums this year. But none will be more fun.

California Wives' music is soft and pleasant and fully formed and vague. Their lyrics are ciphers.

Given the track record Clipse have maintained through this decade with their other two albums and three mixtapes (I’m not counting the official Re-Up Gang album, and neither should you), this is a fine album, but it's still a letdown, plain and simple.

Last Light contains fine songwriting and production and collaborations, but it offers little new.

This is her best album to date.

Ounsworth's impassioned delivery is gone throughout most of Some Loud Thunder, replaced by what can only be described as vague indifference.

Imagine Manu Chao, Serge Gainsbourg and the Cars all caramelized together.

This is almost selfishly indulgent, and unless you haven't heard the previously released "Dr. Marten's Blues," you have very little to learn from the rest of the album.

Some of the artist's best work to date.

Much of the album feels unfocused, as if Cale has become seduced by the smooth trickery of digital production at the expense of cogent songs built on icy melodies, slippery poetics and true invention -- three of Cale's enduring strengths sadly missing through much of the album's fifty-three minutes.

His offbeat interpretations of tough-guy hip-hop cliches often make for great listening, but on We Are Young Money, Weezy decides that he can’t be bothered to display such originality.

So while this new set of Civil War-era songs is an often beautiful listen, they end up obscuring Kenniff's musical vision rather than illuminating it.

It was made confidently, with no apparent intentions of it being some toss-off or fan-only disc. But by album's end, don't be surprised if you're reaching for "Citrus" to dive back into their dream world.

Even if Anti-Flag’s hearts are in the right place, Bright Lights of America is too vague to be impactful.

It's a member of a rock band that plays tightly controlled music stretching his compositional abilities to new instruments and more subtle arrangements. They're not all successes.

As a funk or electro album, As U Were is fun to listen to. A little cheesy, maybe, but it gets the proverbial party started, which is always a clear sign that something's going well. It's when Lyrics Born tries to hang on too tightly to his old roots that things start to get messy.

Had this been Dilated's second album, I probably would have found it a lot more entertaining. But it's not, and the moments of originality were few.

Throughout the album, Crow's vocal melodies are her most ambitious and memorable to date.

Essentially a funhouse mirror of 2007's far superior "Because of the Times," Only by the Night stumbles under the weight of its ambitions by lacking the songs necessary to support them

When the songs are spare nothing feels left out, and when they're grandiosely band-heavy not one harmony or piano fill comes off as pilled on.

The album is a stunningly lackluster, impersonal anti-work.

Sure, it’s nowhere in the same league as the seminal CrazySexyCool and the innovative concept album FanMail, and the absence of Left Eye--apart from a touching brief posthumous appearance on “Interlude”--is still keenly felt. But there are still a handful of tracks here which can sit comfortably alongside their incredible mid-late 90s canon.

With its shameless pop-punk anthems and wonderfully irreverent lyrics, Donkey finds the members of CSS at the top of their game.